


Redemption

by LittleDesertFlower



Series: Reconnaissance Missions [2]
Category: Memorias de Idhún | The Idhún's Memories - Laura Gallego
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, One Shot, Other, Panteón, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:45:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12485132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: Alsan lives - and the aftermath chases him down.





	Redemption

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a silly little thing I wrote because I kinda wanted to explore what would've happened if Alsan's story hadn't ended where it did in Pantheon.

_And the Door collapsed with astonishing violence._

_And after, silence._

_Slowly, the waters slithered down, and the mountains quit their shaking. The light went off. It was night at last, and temperatures returned to a pleasant mild coolness, and the air stilled. Little by little, plants stopped growing._

_After a long while, which he deemed eternal, Jack opened his eyes. He still could see the the bubble of energy that had protected them from the elements vanish. Part of him wondered if all of it wasn’t just a bad dream. Then something stirred in his arm and demanded his attention with a lively cry. The young man returned to reality and sat Saissh on his knees, trying to calm her down._

_He looked around, and saw Victoria lying over Kirtash. The staff lay on the ground, near her._

_“Victoria?” he mumbled. “Are you okay?”_

_She opened her eyes and looked at him, a bit puzzled. Kirtash awoke suddenly and, out of reflex, made for his sword. He relaxed somewhat upon seeing them._

_“What happened?” the shek muttered. “It seems to me we’ve had six gods pass over us, and we’re still alive. How is it possible?”_

_Victoria shook her head and sat up._

_“I – it all happened so fast. The gods lurched over us and I used the staff to create a protection shield … I never thought it would work.”_

_Kirtash frowned, thinking._

_“Anything you do with the staff will work better the more energy you can put to use. It has channeled all the energy of the gods. It had to be an all-powerful shield.”_

_Victoria sat upright, slowly. She felt her stomach swiftly. She felt her son moving inside of her._

_“He’s still alive,” she muttered, with tears of relief. “I can’t believe it. After everything that’s happened, he’s still alive.”_

_Jack smiled, hugely relieved as well. He held her in his arms. Suddenly, she lifted her head, her face frozen in terror._

_“Alsan … No.”_

_“What’s wrong with Alsan?” Jack asked, his heart in his sleeve._

_“I tried for the shield to reach him too, but he was too far. I … I don’t know if I made it in time.”_

_Jack left Saissh on the ground, stood up, and bellowed:_

_“Alsan! Can you hear me?”_

_Only the echo returned his words. A small breeze scattered his hair and face, but he barely felt it. He ran from one side to the other, skipping puddles and climbing over rocks, calling Alsan over and over again, as Victoria hid her face between her hands and broke into soft tears. Kirtash hugged her, trying to comfort her, while Saissh, exhausted, snuggled herself up in a corner and fell into a deep sleep._

_Jack continued to look for Alsan, untiring, until the lights of first dawn touched the peak of the cliff. He refused to believe they had lost Alsan. And yet, logic finally stuck: no one could have survived this._

_With a knot in his stomach, he returned to Kirtash and Victoria. They were still in an embrace. They both looked haunting; they were depleted, but, above all, they looked lost and scared. Jack looked at them, scared. He too felt like that._

_Victoria turned her head to him. They shared a long understanding look. Jack broke down. He knelt by Victoria and hugged her as well. He buried his face in her shoulder and cried, like the night they had first met, there, in Limbhad; he cried for his lost friend, for Alsan king of Vanissar, who had died to help save the world, who had sacrificed himself to make up for his terrible mistake. For Alsan, king of Vanissar, in whose chest had beat the heart of a hero._

_They both stayed there, the three of them, for a long time, unmoving, hugging._

_The world seemed surprisingly quiet and empty. They were still unaccustomed to the silence, to the feeling that it was all over, that, at long last, they would be able to rest._

_The Seventh and the sheks had fled to another world. The Six had no more business in Idhún, therefore had returned to their dimension._

_The world belonged once more to the mortals._

 

* * *

 

The funeral was to be held right there. In the ruins of the Door.

Jack had broken that final hug, there, at the literal end of the world, with the word on his mouth. Everybody deserved some nice words said about them at their funeral, and without a proper ceremony, Alsan would only get the hatred and loathing his last few days on Idhún had granted him. And Jack knew better. The only way he was not laying some flowers next to the thunderous piles of rock that had imprisoned his friend, in his last moments, was if he was removed from the scene by force.

It only took one longing look from Victoria for him to know Alsan would be granted that much. A proper ending.

Kirtash had delicately caught a mountain bird to send a message to their people in Vanissar, and it carried Jack’s words and Victoria’s magic.

_Alsan is dead. We await you here. His funeral is at third dawn._

The young dragon could even see his friends’ faces when receiving the message. One went into war fully aware casualties were as common in those grounds as magic spells and fire power, but deep down, no one really did expect having anyone close to them die.

And Alsan dying … it defied everything Jack had ever believed as a kid. That the strong would prevail, that asking for forgiveness grants you a second chance.

The four of them – baby, shek, dragon, and unicorn – waited, eyes closed, for the haai bird to arrive.

 

* * *

 

 

Shail had been about not to go. What waited for him amidst the rocks was a corpse, not the lively body of, once, the leader of the Resistance. He didn’t want a corpse. He didn’t want a funeral either. What for?, so people would say nice things they would have never dared to say to Alsan in life? So the living would go on living as if nothing had happened?

But then he’d remembered, there would be no “people”; just friends. Their friends. Who would never move on. Who would always remember. Their friends, and a shek who had changed the course of wars by switching sides. Shail couldn’t find an ounce of strength left in him as to hate him for it as he once would have.

He had been about not to go, not because he didn’t care, but because he did. But Alsan was dead, cold, buried already in ash and stone. And Zaisei was alive, and breathing, and lying blind on a cot. And he couldn’t leave her. Not even because of Alsan. And he hated himself for that.

He’d made his mind up about it – he wasn’t going. He could say his goodbyes from this very room, in the very same castle his friend had lived once.

He exhaled, feeling the weight of the day pile up on him, and laid his hand on Zaisei’s. The priestess slept, awaiting, as he was, for help. But there were too many blind in the city, and Victoria, the only one who could truly aid them, was in Gantadd, awaiting him instead.

“You should go,” she whispered sweetly.

Shail bit his lip. She must have heard the message. _She must know_. Of course she knew, she could feel what he did, and process it way better.

He shook his head, to soon remember she could not see. Her eyes were heavily bandaged, although no light would get in even if they were not.

“No,” he said instead, as softly as he could muster. “I’m staying here.”

He abstained from saying she needed him there. That would only anger her, and sadden her. It wasn’t truly her that needed him, it was the other way around – he needed her.

“You would go, if it was me and not him,” she pressed on.

“Don’t say that, Zaisei, for the love of the gods –” he said.

He saw her smile.

“Go.” She urged him to. “Or _I_ ’ll go.”

Shail thought about it again. Thought about what he would say to his dead friend, and what he would have to say to the living ones. The questions he’d have to ask. The truths he’d have to face.

“Come with me, then. I won’t leave you on your own.”

Shail had been about not to go. But he would have probably regretted it his entire life if he hadn’t let Zaisei talk him into it.

 

Upon arriving to the desolation the gods had left behind, Shail didn’t know who to hug first. Victoria, who Alsan had mistreated during the last few weeks of his life, but who had loved him for years, who had been by his side, who had understood him even if it cost her own happiness? Or Jack, probably the second person to love Alsan the most, who had been trained under his harsh command, who had chased his tail after Germany, who had given up on everything for him, and who had forgiven him everything?

But it wasn’t about consoling someone after a loss before turning to console someone else, it was about sharing the loss. And Shail had lost Alsan too, he realized.

He helped Zaisei sit in the shade of a great golden haai, and took several steps forward. The triad were all sitting on the hard ground, entwined as one, holding baby Saaish in their arms.

Shail knelt by them and held Victoria’s hand. He didn’t know what else to do.

She looked up at him, and he saw the light in her glance, bright, like white fire. There was rage and sorrow in those eyes.

“I couldn’t save him,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”

The wizard nodded once, then again, and he finally pressed his forehead with hers. He too felt the immense, almost god-like, grief of the unicorn, although perhaps Zaisei wouldn’t have called it such, but called it his own grief, amplified, or simply _allowed_ to exist.

When he separated from Victoria, his robes were stained with tears. Hers and his.

Soon, Jack’s followed. The boy hugged him, solemnly, and shed tears with him silently for a while, but Shail was sure that had Jack had any more energy, he would have sobbed and cried and cursed the gods until his voice died out.

Then, the wizard sat by them, and patted young Kirtash in the back. He had no grief to share with him, but his once sworn enemy now did truly resemble his real age, and a humanity beyond law or comprehension, even if his skin continued to feel like ice, and Shail wasn’t immune to compassion.

The shek nodded at him curtly in return. And then Shail spoke to the three of them.

“Have you retrieved him?” He refused to call Alsan a corpse yet. Or perhaps ever.

Jack shook his head. “We’d have to move all the rocks first.”

Shail frowned. “He deserves that much.”

“I never said he didn’t,” Jack replied tensely.

“Then why don’t we?”

“It’d take too long. And we’re tired.”

Jack looked at the horizon, covered in stone as well. As far as his eyes could see, everything was entombed. And Alsan could be anywhere. The more he strained to remember exactly where he’d seen him last, holding on to the burning steel of Sumlaris as to help keep the Door open, the less he could pinpoint the place.

“It wouldn’t take that long,” Victoria suddenly said. “With all the energy around us, Shail and I could do it.”

“What for? He’s dead anyway,” Jack spat.

“A proper burial.” Everybody was surprised to see it was Kirtash who had spoken, barely above a whisper. His glacy eyes gave off exhaustion, he had bags under them.

Jack couldn’t help but snort.

“He’s already _buried_ down there, you snake.”

“I seem to recall your preference over proper burials when I showed you to the pit where your parents were left in, dragon.”

Kirtash and Jack stared at each other for some seconds. Ice versus fire, like many other times before. And Jack felt the helplessness he’d first felt when he’d learned his parents were underground, sharing death with countless others, but not sharing the common trait that had ended them up there.

“Alright,” he finally said. “Do it, then.”

Shail shot him a glance, softly. Truth be told, he understood the powerlessness that Jack’s soul had incrusted in itself. Why move him, if he was dead? Things would be different if this was a rescue, and not a funeral.

“I want to see him, Jack,” Shail simply said, serious.

“He’s dead, Shail.” Jack’s eyes shone in despair and tiredness. Even in the light of second dawn, almost third, everybody’s stances around gave the impression of night, of sleepless nights, of death even in life.

“I know.” He nodded. “But I want to see him.”

He held Victoria’s hand tight in his, and closed his eyes. Magic did not work any better with eyes closed than it did with eyes open, but he wanted them shut this time. Nor did this particular motion spell work like the teleporting one, in which you had to be in physical contact with whomever you wanted to teleport alongside with you. Yet Victoria took his hand and he took hers, and he let her channel the leftover godlike energy into him as well as herself. She’d been right. Using that energy, removing rock from rock would prove an easy enough task.

They muttered the spell words together. And Shail could feel the pulsing of the world through him, as he had all his life as a wizard, only this time it beat louder, it felt thicker under his command, stronger. He wondered how much power they were truly handling, and how much was truly the gods’ footprints on the world and how much was just vibrant magic in the air.

He felt his muscles tense up as he let the magic through, as he let it run its course. And when he opened his eyes again, he dropped Victoria’s hand, and pointed at a sword, stuck vertically on the ground, still half-submerged by stone and dust.

“Right there,” he said. And the five of them, including the baby and Zaisei, who Shail guided, moved towards Sumlaris the Unbeatable, living up to its name.

They watched it for a while, all bathed in dirt, coated in obsoleteness.

Victoria was about to suggest perhaps moving the rocks a little more, when Shail felt the earth move nearby. It was a slight tremor in the stone, so slight he feared he might have imagined it, but soon he also picked up a distinct cough under them, and then the stones shook again.

He did not hesitate. He dropped to his knees and started to manually remove ancient rock from ancient rock. When everyone else realized what he was doing, they instantly bowed down to help. But it was still Shail who removed the biggest chunk of mountain he’d seen yet, and saw it: a hole beneath, completely unscathed by the wrath of the gods; and a man, showered in dust and mud, looking up at him in disbelief, extending his ashen hand.

Shail took it, and pulled him up, as Jack cried loudly, hugging Victoria.

Alsan knelt by Shail once he was on firm ground. He looked at his friend for one single second, and that’s how long it took for Shail to wrap both arms around him and rest his head on Alsan’s shoulders.

Slowly, the king of Vanissar hesitantly circled Shail with his own arms, and started wailing like a wounded animal. Jack joined him in his crying.

Victoria sat by the two men hugging, still not letting go, and leaned her head against Shail’s back, closing her eyes. She felt the way she’d used to, years ago, after leaving her house in Madrid to go to Limbhad. Like she could finally breathe out loudly without fear. Like she could let go.

Soon, she and Jack held Shail and Alsan, and not long after, Kirtash helped Zaisei sit down so she could embrace them too.

“The shield _was_ all-powerful…” he muttered to himself. No one heard him anyway. No one but her. The celestian woman whose mother his own mother had murdered, whose life his own family had shaped. She turned to him, and held his hand before joining the group hug. A spurt of spiritual warmth reached him, then her.

 She had a turmoil of emotions raging inside of her, but they weren’t her own, and for once, their intensity didn’t crumble her down. She felt mostly relief, and joy, and eternal exhaustion. But the feeling whose presence most lingered was love. Love for friends and love for one’s partners, love for the enemy you’d once attempted to slay, love for whom you’d meet in your journey. Love, and the celebration of it.

Love at the end of the world, exactly where it had ended, exactly where it had begun anew, reborn.

She thanked the gods in peaceful silence, out of habit.

Love moved the world, she’d always known. Now love gave birth to a new age of the world, a new chapter. Shail would have called it magic. She smiled, because everything was magic to him, and she had to admit, for once, he was right. There was magic in love too.         

 

* * *

 

 

Alsan had slept a long time. And everybody had let him. Sleeping helped, they said. But did it really, when you’d witnessed the end of all known things? Of all loved things? Besides, Alsan knew neither Jack nor Victoria were sleeping. At night, he’d heard them walk the corridors of the castle. All their brains were busy with urgent thoughts, as if the gods were still rummaging villages. It was hard to sleep after all that. Even Shail stayed up late. Now, he could be found sleeping on the floor next to Zaisei, until somebody came along and gently told him to leave, that it would help her better to see him rested and well.

Alsan knew there was no ‘better’. He only had to take a peek outside his window to see the devastation he’d lived to witness, and the work it’d take for something to come out of the ashes.

He’d slept, partly forced to. Partly because his body could take no more. And upon waking, he'd called for Shail.

The wizard looked shaken. Perhaps it had been a discourtesy to summon him like this, knowing it was hard enough to make him leave Zaisei’s side, but Alsan didn’t mean to keep him here long. He didn’t mean to keep anyone here long, not even himself. He saw the people he’d spent the last few years with, and all he could do was look at them and wonder what they were doing there still, why they hadn’t gone somewhere else, somewhere less cruel.

After greeting his friend with a curt nod, Alsan had moved towards the window, and let Shail take the chair.

“I’m giving up the throne,” he said. He didn’t think it necessary to bother with an introduction.

Shail began to stand up.

“Alsan –”

“I’m giving up the throne.” Alsan didn’t turn. “It’s settled.”

“Listen to me,” Shail said, and walked towards Alsan. He put a hand on his shoulder, hesitant at first, “just because you _made_ mistakes, it doesn’t mean you have to make a sacrifice this big. It’s your royal right.” He paused, and Alsan felt his breath against his neck. Shail’s voice sounded soft and strained at the same time. “You’re the king. You’ve always been the king.”

“There are others who will do much better,” Alsan replied.

Shail forced him to face him, and looked into the brown eyes that ogled him, scared.

“What will you do?” he asked in desperation. “Where will you go? This is your home.”

Alsan stood his ground, he neither looked away nor made a grimace. His face was serious, but he leaned against the wall in defeat.

“I killed my brother, Shail,” he stated very clearly. “And I almost got Victoria’s child murdered.   _Victoria_ , Shail. I was ready to sacrifice Victoria.” Alsan took a deep breath, and lowered his sight a little. “How can you still look me in the eye after that?”

Shail gripped Alsan's chin softly.

“I know you,” he said. “And that, that wasn’t you. It was the Stone. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that?” Alsan muttered. Their faces were so close there was no point in speaking louder, nor in pretending to have the strength to.

Shail smiled, weary.

“Because it’s the truth.” He rested his head on Alsan’s left shoulder. “When will you announce it?”

“After first sunset.”

It was barely dusk outside. The suns were soon to set. And another long night was to begin.

“Where will you _go_ , Alsan?” Shail asked again.

“I don’t know.” Alsan said. “Somewhere where they don’t care who I am and what I’ve done.”

“Will you send word? After you’ve settled some place safe?” The wizard’s voice was soft with concern. It felt strange in Alsan’s skin to have someone speak like that to him, truthfully, and like they cared. People had used to respect him, yet few had actually looked right at him and known exactly what lay beneath the armor.

Alsan couldn’t help but smirk. “You’d never forgive me if I didn’t.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised when Shail made eye contact with him again. Gods be good, he would miss those brown eyes Idhún had turned sad after Earth had given them life.

“I would search for you,” Shail said gently. “I’d find you.”

Alsan rested his forehead on his.

“Yes, you would,” he said, and smiled.

The both of them continued to stare into each other’s eyes until the first sun began to fall behind the horizon. Then, they stood side by side, pressed against one another, and both thinking different thoughts about the same things.

“Does anybody else know that you’re leaving?” Shail inquired after a while.

“No,” Alsan said. “Just you.”

The wizard nodded. It had been a few days since they’d found him, but it seemed now that Alsan had been ready to give up on his royal rights as soon as he’d been out of the dirt.

“Are you going to talk to them?”

Alsan sighed.

“Perhaps,” he said, “after. There are things I need to say, but they might not want to hear.”

“You saw them when we found you. They don’t care. They know.”

 _They know you would do everything in your power to take it back. What they don’t know is that’s exactly what you’re doing_ , Shail thought, resigned. Maybe this particular issue was just to be put behind them, and he was positive the Triad were more than willing to let it be so, but seeing Alsan now, being like this, it made him rethink it. Maybe Alsan needed to apologize.

“I hope that is true,” Alsan finally said, concluding the topic. “How are you doing? How’s Zaisei?”

“Victoria’s healing her. She says she might see again one day.”

“I’m glad,” Alsan said, with a nod.

“She doesn’t mind it much. She was scared at first, now she seems … oddly at peace.”

“Strange, what with all the different emotions around her.”

It was strange indeed. But many things had become certain to Zaisei lately, and perhaps that had helped her face this new moment in her life with resolute calmness. Shail and her had talked about him and Alsan before, not much, and not in depth, but Shail was very aware that she knew – how could she not, really, her people always knew what others felt.

“If you go, we will go soon too,” Shail said. “This is not our place.”

“It is your place,” Alsan argued, just as unyielding as Zaisei’s stillness.

“Not without you here.”

“Where will you be headed?”

“With her father, probably. The gods wrecked Haai-Sil; she wants to help in any way she can.” _And I have nowhere else to go._

Alsan paused to think for a moment. He did not yet know where he would go after abdicating, but he had a hunch it would not be Celestia. Too much understanding and forgiveness. Alsan needed a fresh start, where no one would pity or judge him based on what he had become.

“Haai-Sil is … far away,” he finally told Shail.

“I’ll find you, Alsan,” Shail promised. And Alsan knew it to be true. The world wasn’t as big to him as it was to a wizard who’d already been everywhere.

“Alexander,” he corrected him after a brief pause.

“I’ll find you,” Shail said. “Alexander.”

 

 

* * *

  


“You don’t have to do this,” Shail said.

It was inevitable for Alsan to be suddenly, overwhelmingly struck with memories of his coronation day. How long ago had that been?, it felt like another life entirely, as if the past few weeks had made his body cells change in a way that had turned him into a new person. Maybe he was. He’d died. A part of him had died when he’d closed the Door. Shail had picked up the pieces, and the wizard didn’t even know.

“I want to, though.”

Shail hadn’t left the night before, even when Alsan had gone down to apologize to the Triad; when he’d walked up the stairs to his room again, Shail was still there, and no matter how much he’d insisted, he hadn’t left.

They hadn’t slept at all, worrying and finding little comfort in the fact that they were worrying together instead of apart. Alsan couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so wrapped up in something like he was that night in Shail’s presence. He wondered over and over when they’d last shared a bed like that, when they’d last _been_ together like that, if they had. That too felt like another life.

For the first time in a long time, Alsan acted and felt his age. If the Door he’d once crossed had been kind, he would have to add fifteen years to that number, but that wasn’t the case, and he was still just twenty-four, even if everything in him weighted as if he was forty. He _should_ be forty.

Shail put a hand on his shoulder. Shail was twenty-two. The sheer thought of their ages, the sheer thought of comprehension, that those two numbers shouldn’t be such, that they’d lived too much to be so young … it was unbearable, and still it had to be borne. Kings bore, even after abdicating. Even the very minutes before leaving forever.

“I’ll tell them,” Shail continued. Him, the eternal diplomat when there were no other candidates around. Shail would carry the entire planet on his shoulders if Alsan confessed to him that he couldn’t. “You don’t have to do a thing. Not today.”

Alsan turned around to look at him. Lately he never tired of looking at Shail, wondering time and time again how he could’ve been so stupid to not want to look at him that much in his youth. He couldn’t believe he’d been scared of his feelings, especially when he wasn’t explicitly afraid of anything else.

“ _Yes_ ; today.” Alsan took a deep breath, and his voice quivered when he said: “I can’t do this anymore.”

“And you don’t have to,” Shail said. “You don’t have to. You’ve served your country—you’ve saved the world. What else do you want to give them?”

“What they deserve.” Some firmness had slowly returned to Alsan.

“This is not about them. It’s about you,” Shail said, “finally. You’ve spent your life serving people, Alsan. It breaks my heart to see you do this for them when all you want to do is run away.”

The wizard looked at him and exhaled. If only Alsan knew how much it truly broke his heart to see him there, about to give everything up so that the guilt would be his to carry and his alone … if he knew, perhaps, true to loyalty as selfishness, traits he’d been instilled as a child, he wouldn’t abdicate.

But Alsan knew; he just needed to get it over with. He looked at Shail with a longing he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in many, many years, since the first and only days they’d had together.

“Do you remember anymore how old you are, Shail?” he asked.

“Barely.” Shail said, shaking his head. “Why?”

“I remember. It’s far too young. On Earth, someone our age … they’d have their whole life ahead of them.” Alsan stared into Shail’s brown eyes, and almost broke down. Almost. Only his voice did, and only a little. “I feel like I’m way past that, like I’ve always been way past that.”

“Sweetheart…” Shail tried to hold him, but he moved away softly.

“It’s time.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“No,” he said, turning to him. “Not this time.”

 

* * *

 

 

“There is no easy way to say this, so I hope all of you will excuse my skipping the usual protocol. It has not been an easy couple of years, for any of us, I daresay. We’ve lost enough. We’ve fought for too long, and anybody who’s been fighting this planet’s wars knows as well as I do that it’s time to heal what’s been snapped into pieces and put this world together again, build something out of the ashes. I believe this is what we need: to heal. To heal under the wise eyes of new leaders, who are just the right amount of worn out, who know more than anyone what it’s like to battle everything and win even though it seemed impossible. I have been to Earth, and witnessed first-hand what it’s like to be ruled by the same people who once destroyed everything. I don’t want this for my world, and I certainly do not want this for my own country. Therefore, after the shortest reign Vanissar has known, and meaning my bloodline will die with me, I solemnly and humbly quit the throne in favor of those who will come after me, who I hope will do a better job than I did. Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I have a bird prepared for you.” Shail told him as soon as he’d come out, taking him away with magic so that neither Covan nor Jack nor anybody else would follow and chastise Alsan, now crownless, for leaving. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” he said, bearing a weariness that he’d never wanted but had always tried to carry nevertheless.

“Any time.”

“I don’t mean just that. I never told you, and I should have, but I guess I’ve always been too stubborn. What you’ve done. What you _mean_ to me … I’ll always be indebted to you.” And some debts, he felt he’d never be able to repay.

“Alsan—” Shail tried to scold him.

Yet Alsan just pressed on, made of steel, like he’d always been, only now there was a softness to him no one had ever seen. Not even Shail.

“And I’m sorry I was the reason it never worked.”

There was a pause, so brief it felt unreal. Then Shail looked up at him, grief accumulating beneath his chest.

“Who said it never worked?” he managed to say.

“It never worked like I would’ve wanted it to,” Alsan admitted.

“It can still work.”

The former king of Vanissar drew a sad, sad smile on his lips.

“No, it can’t,” he said, slowly.

“Why not?”

And then he said it, the worst words to admit to oneself, and the hardest to say out loud.

“You love someone else.”

“And?” Shail practically laughed. “If there’s anything I’ve learned during all of this, it’s that I shouldn’t have to love just one person.”

“Fine,” Alsan frowned. “I’ll give you that. But still—I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know where you’re going to go …”

This time, he let the wizard hold him in his arms.

He didn’t even know if he really did want to go in the first place, if it wasn’t better, after all, to stay and nurse his wounds and try to tend to everyone else’s … say his apologies, move on. Truth be told, Alsan no longer felt like being forgiven would heal him any more than leaving might.

“Come with us,” Shail begged, tears starting to form. He held Alsan tight, as if he’d never hold him again, and he felt like he never would. Not really.

“No. Shail, I—I’m not like Jack, I couldn’t.”

“Then stay in touch. Wherever you wind up, I promise, I won’t be much farther away. It’s a small world. Just—whatever happens, whatever you’re ready to have with me or not—don’t be a stranger. Seriously, Alsan. Don’t. _Please_.”

It was now that Alsan began to cry softly and silently, like he’d never felt he was allowed to.

“My gods … I still remember … it was barely years ago, but it seems it’s been so long… I remember how you looked at me the first time we met,” his voice, strained, hoarded more memories than it was fair. But he did remember, how young they’d been before war had touched them. Before it’d taken Shail’s leg and self-esteem, and Alsan’s hope.

“I remember that too.”

“We were strangers then.”

They both smiled, and held each other a bit tighter.

“And you fought me for years on end until you realized we hadn’t always been,” Shail said.

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Just don’t be a stranger again, will you?”

“Sure.”

“And make contact, okay? From time to time? I went two years without knowing anything about you. I don’t wanna go through that again now that there’s no Door between us.”

Alsan smiled bitterly.

“You didn’t miss much,” he said.

Then Shail broke the embrace and looked at him, very serious, and said:

“Well, don’t let me miss anything else.”

It was all Alsan could do not to hug him again. He waited a little to walk towards the haai, mounted on top of the outer wall, but when he turned back and saw the wizard hadn’t left, he changed his mind and held him again. Held him like the first time he’d seen him after two years thinking he’d died in Germany, held him like he’d held him barely days ago when he’d pulled him from the entrails of the earth, held him like he hadn’t dared hold him years ago, when feelings felt like ambushes and duty acted as refuge from them.

“Shail?” he said in a choking voice.

“Yeah?” Shail answered, crying silently himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, weeping.

“I know.”

 

Alsan tried not to look back. He really tried. But Shail had been right, and Idhún was a small planet, and even when the castle was a spot of black against a backdrop of pink and orange, Alsan tried to make out his silhouette.

He hadn’t tried to instill some direction into his haai. After all, he didn’t know where he was going. It was a guess as good as any to suppose the haai would eventually descend wherever it liked, and then Alsan would get off the animal and find his own way.

Perhaps he should have thought this through; thought about a place to stay, however indefinitely, until he figured out what he wanted to do. But he’d spent his life led by what others wanted – what he had to do to do right by others –, and now that he had the space and time to be guided by his own choices, he had no idea what he wanted. It didn’t matter, anyway. He had nowhere to go.

Once, he’d called Vanissar home. Then Nurgon, then Limbhad. Then Earth. Then nothing. Now he’d left his hometown, his castle, his people, to waddle into the deep unknown.

He fell asleep soon after the suns set and Vanis was nothing but a spec on a map.

When he opened his eyes again, it smelled like the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> The italicized bits at the beginning are my unofficial translation of a short Pantheon excerpt to fit this narrative written in English and not Spanish.  
> (And, yeah, the last line implies he's gone to Emerald Port hehehe)


End file.
